1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates t o an apparatus and its method for displaying multi-dimensional data, and more particularly to a display tool provided with the function of a front-end for a data mining process.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the development of computers and the Internet, and the appearance of high-density and low-cost memory devices, a large volume of various kinds of information has become available and is able to be stored easily. For example, in the distribution industry, information on the relation. between the sales by retailers across the country and the time of the day is collected using a point of sale (POS) system. In the same way in the financial and insurance industries, information is collected on the used states of credit cards for each customer, and the individual data on each of the insured and used states of insurance, respectively.
Today the research and development of data mining technology has become popular as one kind of technology for extracting information useful to work out business strategies using a large volume of stored information. Data mining means a technology for deriving the rule, trend, pattern, regularity, correlation, etc. from a large volume of collected data, and it is often based on artificial intelligence (AI), neuro-technology, statistical technology, etc.
For the data mining process, for example, methods such as neuro-analysis, clustering, decision tree, memory based reasoning (MBR), and association rule generation are used. Software for realizing each of these analysis methods is often called a data mining engine. This software may be referred to as a xe2x80x9cdata mining enginexe2x80x9d or simply an xe2x80x9cenginexe2x80x9d hereinafter.
However, since the most suitable analysis method differs depending on the purpose of information extraction and the nature of the information to be analyzed, an expected analysis result often cannot be obtained easily. In this case, a user has to continue working by trial and error until the expected analysis result is obtained.
To reduce the work load for obtaining an expected analysis result, it is considered desirable to display the results obtained by each kind of analysis method in a common format. However, in-the conventional data mining technology, a front-end display apparatus, including the software for display has been developed individually for each analyzing method. Although the front-end display apparatus produced for each analyzing method is superior in clearly displaying the results analyzed by that method, it often requires some expertise to understand each analyzing method, and it needs some experience to have a good command of a plurality of analyzing methods.
Conventionally, the result of a data mining process is often output in a table format, and the regularity of data, correlation between data, etc. are not necessarily displayed in an easy to understand manner.
Furthermore, a technology for connecting or unifying these analysis methods has not been provided yet. Namely, the sending and receiving methods of data between a user interface unit and a data mining engine, the starting method of the data mining engine, the displaying method of the result of the data mining process, etc. were different- for each data mining engine. For this reason, it was necessary for a user to use a different data mining tool according to the contents of the work. Therefore, the work load for obtaining an expected result was heavy, except for the case where the most suitable analysis method was known beforehand.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a data display apparatus and its method for displaying the result of a data mining process which is easy to understand. It is another object of the present invention to provide a data display apparatus and its method for handling a plurality of data mining engines uniformly without requiring any expertise of them.
The data display apparatus of the present invention is configured so as to display multi-dimensional data on a display apparatus in the predetermined format of a graph, and comprising the following units: a starting unit which receives an instruction to start a data mining engine in order to execute a data mining process, and starts the data mining engine according to the instruction; and a display controlling unit which receives the result obtained by the data mining engine, and displays the results on the display apparatus in the same format as the predetermined format of a graph.
Another form of a data display apparatus of the present invention comprises the following units: an input converting unit which receives the data mining analysis result on multi-dimensional data, and incorporates the analysis result into the multi-dimensional data to be displayed; and a display controlling unit which displays the analysis result on the display apparatus based on the output of the converting unit in the predetermined format of a graph.
For the data mining process, methods such as association rule generation, clustering, MBR, decision tree analysis, and neuro-analysis are used. The result obtained by this data mining process is displayed in the predetermined form of a graph. As a result, a user can obtain results by various kinds of analysis methods in a common graph.